URL Encoder / Decoder

How to Use the URL Encoder/Decoder

1. Pick a direction - choose "Encode" to turn raw text into a percent-encoded URL-safe string, or "Decode" to reverse a percent-encoded string back into readable characters.
2. Paste your input into the text area. Results update live, so there is no separate submit button.
3. Select the scope: leave Component mode on to encode a single query value or path segment, or enable Full URL mode when the input is an entire address whose structure you want to keep intact.
4. Copy the result with the copy button, or tap Swap to pipe the output back into the input for the reverse conversion.

About URL Encoding

URL encoding, also known as percent encoding, is defined in RFC 3986 and exists because URLs are restricted to a small subset of ASCII. Many characters are either reserved (they have a structural meaning in a URL, such as /, ?, #, and &) or unsafe (such as spaces, quotes, and control bytes). To carry those characters inside a URL, the encoder replaces each byte with a percent sign followed by two hexadecimal digits, so that a space becomes %20 and an ampersand becomes %26.

When the input contains characters outside ASCII, the encoder first converts them to UTF-8 bytes and then percent-encodes each byte individually. A single emoji can therefore expand to twelve or more characters in the output. Decoding reverses this process byte-for-byte and reassembles the UTF-8 sequence.

JavaScript exposes two encoders with deliberately different rules: encodeURI preserves the characters that give a URL its shape, while encodeURIComponent escapes them all. Picking the wrong one is a common source of broken query strings and double-encoding bugs.

Encode URL

To encode a URL online, paste the raw string and let the encoder convert each unsafe character to its percent-encoded form. This online URL encoder takes any input - a query value, a path segment, a redirect target - and produces a URL-safe equivalent in the browser. Common entry points searchers use for this same operation include "url encode online", "online url encoder", "encode url string", "url encode text", and "convert string to url"; they all describe the same flow that the Encode mode covers above.

• Encoding a query value: cats & dogs becomes cats%20%26%20dogs so the ampersand stops splitting the parameter.
• Encoding a redirect target: https://app.example.com/cb?u=1 placed inside another URL must be percent-encoded so its ? and = are not eaten by the outer query string.
• Encoding a filename: a user-supplied title with spaces or quotes encodes cleanly so it can be used as a CDN key or download filename.

Decode URL

To decode a URL online, paste a string that already contains percent escapes (%XX) and switch to Decode mode. The tool reverses each escape back to its original byte and reassembles UTF-8 sequences when the input contained non-ASCII characters. The same operation is searched as "decode url online", "decode encoded url", "url decode encode", and "decode encode url"; the Decode direction handles all of them. Run Decode twice if the input was double-encoded - you will see one layer of % peeled per pass.

• Decoding a Cyrillic value: %D0%BF%D1%80%D0%B8%D0%B2%D0%B5%D1%82 reconstructs into the word privet because each pair of hex digits is one UTF-8 byte.
• Decoding a tracking URL: a long string with %2F, %3A, and %3F turns back into the readable original so you can audit where the redirect points.
• Decoding form data: input encoded as application/x-www-form-urlencoded can be decoded here, but spaces show as + rather than %20 and need a manual +-to-space pass.

HTTP Encoder

The terms HTTP encode and HTTP encoder are commonly used to mean URL/percent encoding inside HTTP requests, since URLs and query strings travel over HTTP. This tool acts as a free HTTP encoder for any portion of an HTTP message that needs URL-safe escaping: the request line, query parameters, Location header values, and form bodies. Whenever you build an HTTP request by hand - in curl, in fetch, or in a Postman script - run user input through this encoder so reserved characters do not corrupt the request.

Note that "HTTP encoding" sometimes also refers to transfer encoding (gzip, deflate, br) or content encoding. Those are separate concepts handled by the server and the browser automatically. This page only covers character-level URL/percent encoding, which is the meaning behind virtually all "encode http" and "http encoder" search queries.

URI Encode vs URL Encode

"URI encode" and "URL encode" are usually treated as synonyms. URI is the broader spec (RFC 3986) and URL is a specific kind of URI - the encoding rules are the same percent-encoding rules. Searches like "uri encode decode" and "url encoding converter" land on the same operation: replace bytes that are illegal in a URI with %XX escapes. The only meaningful distinction is which JavaScript helper to call:

• encodeURIComponent is the right call for a single value (a query parameter, a path segment, a fragment piece) because it escapes every reserved character.
• encodeURI is the right call for a complete address (already-formed URL) because it preserves the structural delimiters : / ? # & =.
• Both produce uppercase hex digits and percent escapes that are byte-identical to a server-side URL/URI encoder, so the output is interoperable.

Examples

• The phrase hello world encodes to hello%20world because the space is not a legal URL character.
• The search query cats & dogs becomes cats%20%26%20dogs in Component mode, safely escaping the ampersand that would otherwise split a query string.
• The Cyrillic word привет becomes %D0%BF%D1%80%D0%B8%D0%B2%D0%B5%D1%82 - each pair of hex digits represents one UTF-8 byte.

When to Use URL Encoding

• Building a query-string parameter that may contain spaces, ampersands, or equals signs.
• Embedding a redirect target URL inside another URL (for OAuth redirect_uri or tracking links).
• Constructing REST API paths where a path segment contains a slash, colon, or user input.
• Encoding a fragment identifier (the part after #) that contains reserved characters.
• Preparing form data before a manual fetch request with application/x-www-form-urlencoded.
• Producing safe filenames derived from user-supplied titles or URLs.